I know that starting to speak later than other children can be a sign of ASD. But can the opposite be a sign as well? Everyone says I started speaking a lot earlier and a lot better than other children. Like they say I was speaking full sentences like an adult or something when other kids were barely talking. Could that be a sign of ASD as well?
Yes! Absolutely! This was me. I spoke very early- around 9 months- and walked very late, around 18 months. Autism is a developmental disability, which means it influences the way a mind develops. The problem is that most people equate “different” with “bad”, and so they assume “developing differently” means “developing badly”, when it doesn’t mean that. It just means developing differently.
So if a child learns to speak too late or too early, these are both indications of “different than normal” development, and could be indications of autism.
I found a great article about this on awnnetwork.org:
“Fortunately, the psychologist who diagnosed me with autism realized that not all autistic children start speaking late; some start speaking early. Not all professionals seem to realize this. I have almost never seen precocious speech on “signs of autism” lists, which often focus only on delayed or absent speech.”
“Precocious” means a skill that a child has developed early.
The article talks about an autistic woman’s experience as a very young girl, learning to speak and read earlier than her peers.
Also, “speaking like an adult” is often a way autistic speech is described. We are often accused of speaking “too formally” or “too advanced for our age”, with larger vocabularies than children who are the same age. The stereotype that all autistic children never learn to speak or have delayed speech is a particularly harmful one, as lack of understanding in this area has led to many autistic children being overlooked for diagnosis.
